Designed with one purpose in mind: to deliver the ultimate experience in sharing storage and accessing data on your network. From the moment you plug it in, you'll be able to have instant access and start sharing data. With its Gigabit Ethernet port, the Drobo 5N is perfect for any connected home, home office, or small office environment in need of a simple, safe device for sharing and backing up every piece of data over your network. Just plug it into any switch or wireless router and you're ready to go. When you need dedicated performance for uploading of large media files, you can even connect the Drobo 5N to your Ethernet port on your computer without any configuration! The Drobo 5N is easy-to-use, expandable, flexible, and most importantly… keeps your data safe.

Features

Leave Your Limitations Behind… Go BeyondRAID®

Built on our award-winning BeyondRAID technology, the Drobo 5N protects your data without any intervention – even in the event of multiple drive failures. You can even switch from single to dual disk redundancy with a single click, ensuring enterprise-level dual parity data protection when required. Drobo’s with BeyondRAID are also self-healing and have virtual hot-spares. If a drive happens to fail, Drobo will automatically re-layout the data to return to a protected state without disruption.

Drobo takes the up front guess work out of determining the amount of capacity you require. Buy the capacity you need today, and when you need more storage, simply replace your smallest drive with a larger one and immediately use that capacity in seconds. You can even mix and match drive brands, capacities and speeds.

To further enhance your experience, every Drobo comes with Smart Volume technology. Smart Volumes® are thinly provisioned volumes that automatically utilize capacity as needed from a common pool of storage. Additionally, as data is deleted, free capacity is returned to that common pool, immediately increasing the available capacity.

Compact, Expandable Design

Expanding your storage capacity with a Drobo couldn’t be easier. There’s no long, risky process to add capacity to a Drobo – no need to go through the time consuming and complex administration of destroying your RAID sets and recreating with larger drives; and then finally restoring from your backup. When it’s time to add storage capacity to a Drobo, simply insert additional disk drives or replace the smallest disks with larger ones. The unique compact, carrier-less drive-bay design results in an attractive, efficient storage array that won’t dominate your valuable desk space.

If you’re running low on space, the lights on the front of the Drobo 5N tell you exactly what to do. The innovative, user-friendly industrial design allows you to add or hot-swap larger capacity drives, without tools, on the fly, for storage expansion with zero downtime. Expand your capacity without missing a beat while safely storing and backing up all personal data with ease and peace of mind. It’s that simple!

To keep capacity of your Drobo 5N at a maximum, the Drobo Accelerator Bay accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD, leaving all five 3.5” drives bays available for high-capacity HDDs.

If getting the fastest performance possible is your thing, you can also load up every drive bay with SSDs. Drobo 5N gives you the flexibility to choose!

DroboApps

The myDrobo platform provides end-to-end secure access to services on your Drobo from the public internet, through a user chosen mydrobo.com address. It enables services such as DroboAccess, Koken and WordPress to be accessed remotely in a secure fashion.

Other Drobo Apps are embedded applications that extend the capabilities of the Drobo 5N. Partnering with strategic application vendors and solution providers (e.g. Elephant Drive & Plex), Drobo now offers enhanced features that augment user data interaction. Drobo Apps are designed to be simple to install and configure – just like a Drobo! Installation is performed from within Drobo Dashboard, and all applications are fully supported by Drobo and our technology partners.

Centralize Your Backup

The Drobo 5N enables you to centralize your network backup for Mac and Windows users in small offices or workgroup environments. With the most seamless support for Apple Time Machine by any network storage system on the market, backing up your data is as easy as clicking a box in the Drobo Dashboard!

Power Protecting Your Critical Data

The Drobo 5N doesn’t just protect from drive failures, it also includes a battery backup system that protects all data in memory or cache. That’s right, Enterprise grade data protection for you on your Drobo 5N! If power spontaneously goes away, the Drobo stays alive long enough for the data to be written to disk, ensuring your important information is always safe. The onboard battery recharges itself and is designed to last for the life of the product.

DroboCare™

Our world-class DroboCare support offers powerful protection for all Drobo products. Whether you depend on Drobo for your photo collection or critical business data, our trained professionals are available around the clock to help. In addition to extending technical phone support, DroboCare offers a wide array of benefits over our standard warranty including migration assistance, expedited hardware and rescue kits to ensure you get everything you need, when you need it.

Specifications

Connectivity

1 x Gigabit Ethernet port

Drives and Expansion

Up to five (5) 3.5″ SATA II/III hard disk drives or solid state drives (sold separately).

One (1) mSATA solid state drive in the Drobo Accelerator Bay for increased performance (sold separately).

Drives of any manufacturer, capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache can be used. No carriers or tools required. Click here for drive recommendations.

Expandable by adding drives or hot-swapping drives with larger ones. Use the Capacity Calculator to estimate available storage in various configurations.

Beyond RAID Features

Thin Provisioning

Instant Expansion

Mixed Drive Size Utilization

Automatic Protection Levels

Single – or Dual-Disk Redundancy

Virtual Hot Spare

Data Aware

Drive Re-ordering

Management

Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights

Drobo Dashboard version 2.6 or later

Operating System Support

Mac OS X 10.7 and higher

Windows 10 32 and 64 bit

Windows 8/8.1 32 and 64 bit

Windows 7 32 and 64 bit

Network Protocols

Common Internet File System (CIFS) / Server Message Block (SMB)

Apple Filing Protocol (AFP)

Hardware Features

Carrier-less Drive Bays

Power Fail Protection

Kensington Lock Port for Security (lock not included)

Additional Software Features

Hot Data Caching

Drobo Apps

myDrobo compatible

Maximum System Capacity: 64TB

Drive Spin Down

Dim Lights

OS X Time Machine Support

Warranty

One (1) year warranty in the US or outside the EU or two (2) year warranty in the EU.